League of Legends All-Star tournament inspired by traditional sports

Riot Games is drawing on the strctures surrounding meatspace sports in order to help transform League of Legends into a true spectator esport.

“We looked at the more traditional sports like baseball, football, basketball, soccer. And a big thing that we’d never seen done before is an all-star game,” Riot’s Dustin Beck told Edge.

“We want viewers to expect a high-quality broadcast, just like if you’re watching Monday Night Football. We want to mimic that. We’ve hired people with experience at the Olympics. Our head of global content is a three-time Emmy Award winner,” he added.

“We’ve also added some other core elements that I think have been missing from eSports. We do a really good job of storytelling behind the scenes. We want to know who [North American all-star] Dyrus is. We want to know who Dyrus’ dad is.”

The full feature contains some interesting discussion of how Riot i highlighting individual players and teams to bring more personality to League of Legends as a spectator sport, and giving shoutcasters professional commentary training.

League of Legends is one of the biggest games in the world, boasting what may be the largest player base among PC games. It’s free-to-play and has a near-vertical learning curve.

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